Internalizing "The Struggle"
When we’re envisioning how a future version of events will play out, we tend to associate those events with “The Struggle.” We constantly hear messages about how “Life is hard”, “No pain no gain”, “Nothing in life is free” - and we also are instinctually wired to look for the warning signs of potential future struggles so that we can avoid them.
But this type of mindset can significantly impede our progress because if we believe that we have to struggle, our attention is drawn to the struggle - and we tend to find all sorts of evidence in our day to day to confirm that things must be hard, and in turn we make them hard.
In this episode, we cover how to notice when you’re telling yourself a story about your future that involves “The Struggle”, and how to reroute this thought away from internalizing The Struggle and toward processing challenges in a healthy way, and in a way that leaves room for inspiration and growth.
Episode Transcription
Intro:
When we’re envisioning how a future version of events will play out, we tend to associate those events with “The Struggle.” We constantly hear messages about how “Life is hard”, “No pain no gain”, “Nothing in life is free” - and we also are instinctually wired to look for the warning signs of potential future struggles so that we can avoid them.
But this type of mindset can significantly impede our progress because if we believe that we have to struggle, our attention is drawn to the struggle - and we tend to find all sorts of evidence in our day to day to confirm that things must be hard, and when we do that we in turn make them hard.
So in this episode, we cover how to notice when you’re telling yourself a story about your future that involves “The Struggle”, and how to reroute this thought away from internalizing The Struggle and toward processing challenges in a healthy way, and in a way that leaves room for information and inspiration and growth.
Here we go.
Main:
There’s a very common mindset trap we instinctively think our way into, which is this idea of internalizing The Struggle, and call this The Struggle with a capital S.
And when I say the Struggle, what I mean is this idea that everything we do in our personal or professional lives, or anything we want to achieve, and goals we establish for ourselves - all of it must involve some component of Struggle.
As we look into the future and think about what the future holds for us, and as we think about how to prepare for and navigate those things, we have a tendency as humans to associate some aspect of struggle with future versions of events that we conceive.
Think about for a second how much of your mindset throughout the day is focused on identifying things in your future that will involve some aspect of struggle? I’m talking about small things like how am I going to manage all of the things I have to do today, to “how am I going to make enough money to support my lifestyle,” “how am I going to make this new business work,” “how am I ever going to transition out of this career that I don’t like.”
And if you think about it, we constantly are hearing and seeing so many messages each and every day that confirm that LIFE IS A STRUGGLE. EVERYTHING IS HARD. WORK HAS TO BE HARD. RELATIONSHIPS HAVE TO BE HARD. NO PAIN NO GAIN. NOTHING IN LIFE IS FREE. NOTHING COMES EASY. We’ve all heard and internalized those messages.
When we hear messages like that, over and over, it makes us think that "that's the way it has to be."
We assume that some component of the future version of events that we’re focused on is going to involve struggle, or the potential for failure, or difficulty, or rejection by others.
Let me give you a quick example from my life. I talk pretty often about how I started my career as a lawyer and practiced law for about 6 years before founding my current tech startup.
And as I’m sure you’ve heard before, there’s a lot of data and folklore out there about how hard it is to start a startup. There’s a lot of articles and data on how the overwhelming majority of startups fail, and you’ll hear so many startup founders talking about the Struggle with a capital S. How much you have to sacrifice, how hard it is to get funding, how basically the cards are not only stacked against you but drastically stacked against you.
And so for me as a brand new founder who had never started a startup let alone a tech company, that was a narrative and a storyline that I internalized from the very beginning.
In other words, when I thought about what it would take to actually succeed, and when I thought about what my days would involve, I assumed and had immediately adopted the belief that every day had to be a struggle. Because that’s what I’d heard.
Now that’s just one example, but I want you to take a second and try to call to mind an example from your own life where as you’ve thought about something you’ve wanted to accomplish or achieve, your mind was immediately drawn to the idea that doing it is going to involve suffering.
And the reason our mind is trained to focus on struggle is of course because that’s a prehistoric survival mechanism that’s been encoded in our DNA. Our prehistoric ancestors were the ones who survived, and the reason they survived was because they were very good at looking forward and anticipating things that might pose danger for them, or that they might struggle with - because if they could anticipate those struggles, that meant they had a better chance of preparing for them or avoiding them, which meant a better chance of survival.
So your instinct to look for struggle, your instinct to look for danger, your instinct to look for failure - it is coded into your DNA and still present inside of you, which means it takes some work to recognize it and overcome it.
And while your instinct to protect yourself in this way was a great way to survive tens of thousands of years ago, it is a major impediment to your present-day ability to grow.
Here’s why it can be so destructive: when we believe that we have to struggle, our attention is drawn to the struggle.
We seek it out. We focus on it. We anticipate it. We search for it because we've already pre-conditioned ourselves to believe that it MUST exist, and we want to try to resolve it or avoid it.
We’ve already told ourselves that it’s going to show up at some point, and so that means we’re constantly looking for it.
And when we get even the faintest signal that something isn’t going our way, we immediately say: "Oh there it is, I knew it would eventually show up. Things couldn't have stayed this good for so long without something bad happening.”
What we do is create a self-fulfilling prophecy and the Struggle is at the center of it.
But if we look a little closer at this, at the end of the day this instinctual response is really just causing us to create a story. All of these beliefs revolve around a story that we’ve told ourselves.
So when I say to myself “founding a startup is hard” or “growing a startup is hard” or “securing funding” is hard, that’s a story that I’ve told myself. That type of belief is the framework for a story that I’ve created in my head about how things are going to go - well before anything has actually happened.
And when we tell ourselves a story like that, we essentially construct a version of our future reality and predict how it’s going to go. And then what happens is, once we’ve created this framework where we’ve already established a belief that it’s going to be hard, then our minds automatically search for information that will support and validate that story.
So in other words, when we construct a belief and internalize it, our mind looks for information to support it, and not only that, our minds create ADDITIONAL thoughts that confirm the story.
So what does that mean? That means we go through our day looking for indicators that confirm the belief we’ve created, because that’s what we now expect to happen - and we internalize it in a way that shapes how we move through our day.
And we end up sitting in a place where our EXPECTATION is that something is going to go wrong, or that what we want to do is going to be hard.
So back to my example, when my expectation is that I’ll encounter the struggle, I imagine that no one is going to like the product that my company is building, or that it’s going to be hard to build, or that finding fundraising partners will be challenging.
BUT. Here’s the good news. We can acknowledge the potential for struggle or challenges without the paralyzing effects that come with internalizing it. We can acknowledge and plan for challenges we might face in the future without letting the Struggle create the framework that we use to move through our day.
We can recognize that it might happen, but we can also choose to believe that that’s not the story we want to tell about how things will unfold.
So how do we do that? We’ll there’s a starting point I want to share with you that will help you begin to reframe your thinking, and it has three parts.
Part 1: Call to mind something that you want to do that you are ASSUMING will involve some sort of struggle. It could be a life change you want to make, a personal goal you want to achieve, a career change, anything where when you close your eyes and think about it, you picture the Struggle with a capital S and that struggle is preventing you from getting started or moving forward.
Maybe it’s a fitness goal, a hard conversation you need to have, a new company you want to start, a new idea you want to put out into the world.
Part 2: Once you have that situation called to mind, ask yourself: What would this future event look like if it didn’t involve struggle? And with this one, what I want you to do is envision what it would look like to not have to struggle.
We spend so much time thinking about the struggle - but what I’m inviting you to do is flip that. I’m inviting you to tell yourself a different story about what it will be like to do this thing, without struggle. What if changing your career was a smooth process? What if launching your new business was easier than you thought it would be? What if that project you’re working on turns out better than you think?
If you’re going to tell yourself a story, why not tell yourself one that has you succeeding? Why not tell yourself one that has it being a smooth process? You can appreciate the challenges and the risks that come along with those undertakings without making those challenges the main event.
Now you might be thinking: well that’s unrealistic, I know at some point I’m going to encounter something that will be hard or challenging. And my response is maybe, but what good does internalizing that potential struggle get you?
There’s a big difference between having an intentional thought process around future challenges that might come up, and actively thinking about your solutions to them. That’s called planning. That’s called strategizing. And so I’m not suggesting that you don’t anticipate obstacles or challenges and plan for them, I would actually encourage you to develop a regular, healthy process around that because it’s in many ways it’s fundamental.
But spending time intentionally planning and strategizing is different from continually internalizing a future version of events in such a way where you’re normalizing and associating struggle with your core identity.
What I’m suggesting is you catch yourself when you’re spending time inside of a story, and internalizing a story that involves a future struggle THAT MAY NEVER COME TO PASS. You can plan and prepare without internalizing.
Part 3: Every time you catch yourself internalizing the struggle, spend a few seconds replacing that future version of events with a struggle-free story. This is an opportunity to catch yourself and reframe your thoughts, I would call it a reroute.
So in my example, when I catch myself saying “No one’s going to like this product that we’re building,” I catch myself and do a re-route: I envision us helping thousands of people live a better life by using our technology. Thousands of people. And I envision them smiling and being happy and giving us positive feedback, and our team feeling excited about how we’re changing the world.
That’s a story that I want to tell myself. That’s a story that allows me to go through my day looking for opportunities, and progress, and wins, and things that confirm THAT story. And when I do that, I’m much more likely to attract information and inspiration and ideas that confirm the version of events that I want, not the one I’m afraid of.
So to quickly recap:
Part 1: Call to mind something that you want to do that you are ASSUMING will involve some sort of struggle.
Step 2: Once you have that situation called to mind, ask yourself: What would this future event look like if it didn’t involve struggle?
Step 3: Every time you catch yourself internalizing the struggle, spend a few seconds replacing that future version of events with a struggle-free story.
What you’ll notice is that over time, your mind begins to shift to a place where you’re automatically presenting yourself with a vision of a path forward that doesn’t involve suffering. It doesn’t involve struggle.
And when you do spend time acknowledging and thinking through future challenges, you start to flip from assuming that life must be difficult to having an innate confidence that you’ll be able to work through any challenge you’re presented with.
Now I do want to say that of course we learn a lot about ourselves and we build character and there’s an incredible amount of important growth that comes from struggle, so I just want to be clear that I’m not saying that what we’re trying to do here is pursue a life without challenges. This is different.
We can learn from challenges and make exponentially more progress if we see a struggle for what it is, and if we don’t put it at the center of our story and make it the main event. We can receive the lessons we need without forecasting and putting ourselves in a constant state of stress because we’re anticipating a future struggle.
In other words we can have a very healthy relationship with Struggle, with a capital S, if we choose to. And I hope you’ll choose that for yourself.
Go have a great workday.